It will take a "number of years" for South Korea and the United States to evaluate whether it's good for Seoul to produce low-enriched uranium fuel for power plants on its own under a new nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S., a former American negotiator said Friday.
Earlier this week, Seoul and Washington announced the revision to their 1974 nuclear energy cooperation pact after more than four years of negotiations to reconcile Seoul's demand for the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and enrich uranium with Washington's concerns about proliferation.
The new agreement still bans Seoul from reprocessing and enrichment, but it opens the way for the Asian ally to begin research into a new technology for spent nuclear fuel recycling, known as "pyroprocessing," and to make low-level enriched uranium with U.S. consent.
"All kinds of factors will be looked at. What does the international market in enrichment services look like? Is it well supplied? Is it a buyer's market? What are the costs of enriched uranium over time?" said Robert Einhorn, former special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control at the U.S. State Department.
"All of these factors will be taken into account in evaluating whether indigenous enrichment is a good option for the ROK or not. This will take a number of years," he said during a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace discussion.
Einhorn led negotiations for the pact's revision for more than two years until May 2013.
Some critics have raised worries about possible implications the new agreement will have on the negotiations aimed at ending the North's nuclear program, but Einhorn and other experts dismissed such concerns.
"I don't think this agreement will have very much impact on prospects for success for negotiations with North Korea. I think the main impediment now is North Korea's determination to pursue a dual-track approach of improving economic development at the same time improving its nuclear deterrent," Einhorn said.
"There's nothing in this agreement that in any way precludes going forward with denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," he said.
Victor Cha, chief Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also said the new agreement still "keeps South Korea's obligations intact" with regard to the 1991 inter-Korean declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Scott Snyder, a senior researcher on Korea at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the new deal allowing Seoul to peacefully use nuclear energy highlights the "consequences" of North Korea's decision to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The new pact will "support U.S.-ROK cooperations on the peaceful side, more integrations with agencies like the IAEA, hopefully greater Korean contributions to the policy side on the nonproliferation front. So, it really drives deeper the divide between North and South Korea on this question of proliferation," he said. (Yonhap)
